A Eulogy for My Mom (and an Ode to OxyClean)

I want to thank you all for being here today to celebrate the OG — my dead
mommy dearest.

I’m not entirely sure who the person speaking before me was but, I want to quickly acknowledge that mystery speaker #23 read a bible verse that’s definitely typically read at… weddings? “Love is patient”? My mom is fucking dead, my dude. Love is kind my ass. Thank you for ruining every heteronormative wedding I’ll have to go to in the future. Now, when I hear a bride recite the words “love is blind” to some guy named Brian that she met in a bar over a beer and shot combo, I’ll inevitably start crying (as if that wouldn’t make anyone cry).

If I seem pissed, it’s because I haven’t jacked off in a full day which is a lot to say for a seventeen-year-old girl in 2010 who has learned how to illegally stream all the episodes of One Tree Hill and knows which ones have the best shirtless Chad Michael Murray scenes by heart. Instead, my primary method of combatting insomnia has been scrolling through Facebook until four AM or until my corneas light on fire, whichever comes first.

Also, let me make it very clear that I KNOW my pants look this way. They are
(surprise) not my pants. My dad is much wider and much shorter than I and it’ll be about two more years before clinical depression convinces me to exclusively wear black skinny jeans. I didn’t buy any yet because I didn’t want to put out the kind of juju that says my-mom-is-dying-incredibly-soon-and-I-will-need-to-wear-black-at-her-funeral. Alas, she is dead, and here I am, Hurricane Magda, flooding it up in front of half of my estranged Polish family and the girl who bullied me from 2006-approx. 2010.

The thing they don’t tell you about your mom dying is that it makes your body do really exciting things, like get nauseous at the thought or sight of layers and layers of phyllo dough. I knew it was pretty bad when my friend Nicole brought over baklava a mere seven hours after my mom had crossed into the next dimension (homemade fucking baklava for those who didn’t let that fully sink in the first time), and I didn’t eat four slices immediately.

Another exhilarating gift the universe gives you when the person who gave you life dies are repeated and unrelenting cute little reminders. These include but are not limited to: “mom’s favorite cookies” and “mom’s favorite song” which are simultaneously thrust in your face at locations like ‘grocery stores” that play “Cancer Treatment Center of America radio ads” over their “loudspeakers.”

I made a pinky promise with myself that I wouldn’t cry during this eulogy, and I would like to take a moment to recognize that I’m absolutely nailing it. That pinky promise will last for the next three years until I unexpectedly have a full-blown panic attack in front of thirty of my college classmates brought on by… you guessed it! Absolutely nothing. What this will teach me is that falling apart in front of thirty of your classmates pales in comparison to drunkenly bursting into tears at a New Years Party with seventy-five of your classmates because you smell your mom’s perfume on a random girl named Kelsey.

Though I might be a blip in history and just a mere sack of bone muscling through life until climate change kills us all, I got to love my mom for seventeen years! Seventeen years is long enough that she taught me how to (mostly) adult correctly without leaving me to rely on two straight white men (some call them “dad” and “brother”) that could’ve easily turned into a modern-day “raised by wolves” if she had left any sooner. Despite my beef with God right now, I think that’s insanely miraculous. With this fancy new innate sense of my mortality, I’ve come up with a list of things I want to accomplish before I also bite the dust: try anal. Sorry, dad!

Okay, for real, the last thing I’ll say is this — we will all be a part of the Dead Mom’s Club one day (yay!) It’s important to remember this when you’re sobbing on the floor of your bedroom wondering how you can go on in this life without a mom to take you to the mall to buy you sweaters you can’t afford. It’s helpful to remember that other people have made enough money to buy their own sweaters. Being a mom is hard and we all could benefit from saying thank you and I love you to the woman who literally pushed your mom-I’m-in-the-middle-of-something-let-me-call-you-back ass out into the world.

Thanks for teaching me to use Oxyclean and detergent together to keep my
“whites white”, mom, and also, in a nutshell, everything.